No missing you too, he noted. And who was she with at nine o’clock on a Sunday that she couldn’t answer her phone or reply to a text message without making him wait more than half an hour? He felt the onset of depression.
Then his phone whooshed again: I’m gonna miss you too, Sugarplum.
Now he felt like a million. The odd thing, of course, was that their relationship-if they had one-would not actually change at all. Neither had had time to meet again for the action replay, and they could text and email just the same while he was in Thailand as when they were ten miles apart in London. So, in terms of cyberspace, nothing was going to change over the next week. Was it?
Fred took out a book he’d bought the day before by some expat Brit who’d made a name for himself writing noir novels about Bangkok bargirls.
He speed read it, skipping all the poverty-and-preaching stuff, grabbing what he needed. The main point was that Bangkok bargirls almost all came from this Isaan place, which was in the Northeast. He figured a smart move would be to spend Monday night doing the bars in Bangkok and learning about Isaan, so he’d have all the background he needed without having to schlep all over the countryside in a hire car. If he had any talent at all, he told himself, it was for finding the quickest smartest way to the guts of his stories.
2.
Fred wasn’t sure of anything except it was Tuesday and there was a body in the bed next to him. When he adjusted his mobile to Thai time, it was still Tuesday, but much later in the day and the brown girl was turned away from him. He stood up to walk around the bed and look at her. His first reaction was to congratulate himself on his good taste. This was a truly beautiful woman, with high cheek bones and an elegant gauntness, full sweet lips.
From the shape of the bed clothes, the rest of her was pretty well put together, too. When she smiled he felt even more pleased with himself.
‘Hi. I’m Lalita.’
‘Right,’ Fred said. ‘I’m Fred.’
‘I know. I wasn’t drunk last night.’
Fred nodded thoughtfully. ‘Would you mind telling me what happened?’
‘You got drunk and kept telling me how beautiful I was. You paid my bar fine, so I had to look after you. You were going to ring the bell, but I stopped you.’ Her English was almost perfect, with a mid-Atlantic accent.
‘Bell?’
‘Every bar has a bell. If you ring it you have to buy everyone a drink.
There were about fifty people there. I saved you about twenty thousand baht.’
He made the calculation. A thousand quid? Jesus. ‘Thanks.’
She smiled again. ‘But you were too drunk to get it up. You want to do it now?’
Fred blinked. ‘You want to?’
‘I don’t care. I want to get paid, but I’m not a beggar. So?’
He took a step forward, which brought him to the edge of the bed. He was naked except for his shorts, which she pulled down enough to expose his member. She rose to sit cross-legged on the bed, in T-shirt and panties.
He watched her cup one hand under his testicles and, with the other, slowly, expertly, and tenderly produce an erection. She made sure it was good and firm before putting it in her mouth. After a minute or so she took it out again.
‘You want to come like this, or you want to fuck me?’
‘I don’t know,’ Fred said, still half drunk, ‘to tell the truth I think …’ He put out a hand to steady himself on her thin shoulder. A spasm.
Now his sperm was all over her tiny brown hand. She shook it as if she was shaking off a cobweb. Suddenly anxious to save her from indignity-
beauty had that effect on him-he grabbed a box of Kleenex that was on the bedside table and handed it to her. She first cleaned him, then her hand.
‘Well,’ Fred said, still leaning on her shoulder and feeling dizzy.
She looked into his eyes. ‘You want me to stick around so you can do it properly? Or are you always like this? Are you alcoholic?’
‘How much d’you want?’
‘Two thousand baht, same as if you fucked me. That’s because I stayed the night with you.’
Two thousand baht: that was less than he’d spent on champagne on that one and only night with Penny. And it wasn’t even a full night. He’d had to get in his car at a freezing 3 am because she couldn’t sleep with someone else in the bed with her. ‘I understand.’
‘So?’
‘We don’t have to do it. Just stick around for an hour or so, I’d like to ask you some questions.’
‘Again?’
‘Was I that drunk? Did someone spike my drink?’
‘Why would anyone do that? Have you been looking at one of those websites?’
A pause while he looked around the room. ‘Maybe I do have a drink problem,’ he said, mostly to himself. He remembered, now, how wired he was when he hit the bars. When wired, he drank. It went with the job.
In London, if you wanted people to talk, you bought them drinks. No one likes to drink alone, so you drink with them.
He’d never had such a complete memory blackout before though.
Maybe it was the jetlag. He shrugged. ‘Did I ask you about Isaan?’
‘Yes.’
‘And about that case?’
‘The English guy who got shot to death? Yes.’
Fred pulled his shorts back up and sat next to her on the bed. There was something deeply troubling about this situation that he could not quite put his finger on. She was so friendly, chummy even, like they were old pals. It wasn’t right to feel this relaxed with a stranger, a whore, in a country he’d been in for less than a day. Culture shock: he couldn’t think of anything so thoroughly un-British. Where was the paranoia on both sides, the mutual contempt between prostitute and client, the guilt, the nausea? And how was it he was starting to feel horny after he’d just come? That hadn’t happened to him since he was sixteen. He slipped a hand up her back under the T-shirt, then round to her breasts. Full, young, firm. He felt that hand again, working the outside of his shorts this time. He groaned with a sense of foreboding: If this is as good as it looks where the eff have I been all my life?
She slipped out of her T-shirt and panties, pushed him back on the bed so she could pull his shorts off, straddled him, worked on both his and her private parts until both their bodies were ready for fluid exchange, then reached behind him to find a condom, which she spread wide and slipped on.
Now she eased him inside her. He couldn’t believe it. Exactly five and a half thrusts and he was jerking uncontrollably again. She eased herself off of him, carefully removed the clotted condom, cleaned him again, took the condom to the bathroom, returned, naked, with another of those incredible smiles.
‘Why are you crying, Fred?’
‘I don’t know,’ Fred said.
‘Don’t know?’
‘I think it might be because you’ve just made a fantasy come true, and that scares the living shit out of me.’
She blinked. He’d lost her in his culture shock. ‘You need an interpreter when you go to Isaan?’
‘Oh Christ yes,’ Fred said, wiping his cheeks with a Kleenex.
‘You’ll have to pay my bar fine for as long as it takes.’
‘Whatever,’ Fred said, ‘It’s all on expenses.’
‘Really?’
‘I mean the interpreting, not the sex.’
She pulled on her T-shirt and panties and fished a mobile out of a handbag. She spoke rapidly in Thai, then closed the phone. ‘You have to pay for a week, in advance. Give me the money so I can take it to the mamasan now. Or is a week too long?’
‘How about we make it a year?’ Fred said.
That made her laugh, an old-fashioned belly laugh like his granny used to have. In London they didn’t laugh like that anymore.